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Just Looking
A Critic’s Eye on New England Art
Take a look at art in New England with Edgar Allen Beem. Read his recent interview on contemporary art in New England with the Abbeville Manual of Style.
He's been art critic for the Portland Independent, art critic and feature writer for Maine Times, and now is a freelance writer for Yankee, Down East, Boston Globe Magazine, The Forecaster, and Photo District News.
He's the author of Maine Art Now (1990) and Maine: The Spirit of America (2000). In 1988, he won the Manufacturers Hanover Art/World Award for Distinguished Newspaper Art Criticism for his coverage of the 1987 auction sale of Vincent Van Gogh's Irises.
Ed says, "My credo as an arts writer has long been: 'The work of art is the search for meaning.' I believe art is not only a form of personal expression but also a form of inquiry, every bit as much a quest for truth as scientific research."
Collecting Rock Stars
Backstage Pass at Portland Museum of Art
January 1, 2009 at 3:26 PM | Post a Comment
The Portland Museum of Art is kicking off the New Year with a major rock show. Backstage Pass: Rock & Roll Photography (January 22 through March 22) is an exhibition of some 200 photographs of rock and jazz musicians, all borrowed from the collection of a Maine summer resident who wishes to remain anonymous.
Abstraction Based on Observation
Jon Imber at Boston's Nielsen Gallery
December 17, 2008 at 9:39 AM | Post a Comment
Jon Imber spends part of the year in the city and part of the year in a small coastal village, and his art reflects this movement. Imber moves between abstraction and representation about as easily and seamlessly as any painter I know.
Jon Imber burst on the Boston art scene in the late 1970s after having graduated from Boston University where he studied with the hugely influential painter Philip Guston. His initial success was based on powerful figurative paintings of a philosophical and allegorical nature. Jon Imber: New Paintings, his current (through January 10) exhibition at Nielsen Gallery in Boston, features a pair of self-portraits that, though stylistically much freer and brushier than his early work, speak to his figurative roots, but the majority of the new paintings are painterly abstractions based on observation.
Painting Fabric Patterns in Portland
Alice Spencer's Fabricating Time
December 11, 2008 at 3:08 PM | Post a Comment
Alice Spencer has been an important member of the Portland, Maine, arts community for 30 years. In addition to being a fine painter and printmaker, she is a co-founder of the Peregrine Press printmaking collaborative, a former member of the Maine College of Art board of directors, and chair of the City of Portland Public Art Committee.
Deconstructing Architecture for Fun
Kirsten Reynolds at the Currier Museum
December 4, 2008 at 9:39 AM | Post a Comment
When a New England artist attracts attention it usually starts locally and spreads regionally. If the artist is fortunate and talented enough, that attention sometimes leads to great visibility around the country. One of the New England artists getting a lot of attention at the moment is Kirsten Reynolds of Newmarket, New Hampshire.
Whose Drawings Are They Anyway?
Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings at MassMoCA
November 28, 2008 at 10:50 AM | Post a Comment
The history of art has long legitimized the practice of apprentices, assistants, and technicians helping to create the works of master artists, preparing and stretching canvases, applying preliminary coats of paint, working under the master's direction. A great many prints are made by master printers from artists' paintings and drawings. Large-scale sculpture is often fabricated by artisans working from models or maquettes. Personally, I prefer to see the hand of the artist at work in something more than his/her signature, but concept trumps execution in the canon of contemporary art.
